Maryam Tafakory – Expression as resistance

When discussing Maryam Tafakory’s work, the word that comes to mind is ‘multidisciplinary.’ All-encompassing, the terminology is an apt one, for Tafakory has managed within the short span of a decade to amass one of the most artistically cohesive body of works that weaves together poetry and documentary, performance and archival material, with essay and collage filmmaking. This artistic mosaic is threaded by intimate, critical analyses of gender roles, societal prohibitions and the dominant structures that govern their representation within post-revolution Iranian society and cinema.

Having graced internationally renowned art & cinema institutions (MoMA, Tate Modern, BOZAR, Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, Locarno, Toronto IFF), Tafakory’s cinema focuses on structural erasures, exploring the socio-political codes and conditions that regulate the public and the cinematic realms. 

Through poetry and the coded language of Iranian cinema, Tafakory liberates and empowers the privacy of the self - as a form of consciousness and social domain - by voicing the gendered subjectivities stifled and conditioned by ideology and its heavy policing within the public sphere.

Thus, the simple act of expression - be it spoken out loud, gestured, written or referenced - becomes a form of resistance, even moreso when it interpolates the viewer within its discourse via cinematic identification with its narrative voice.

The program Code Names compiles her most recent works which use post-revolution Iranian cinema as the material basis of deconstructing the codification of social norms and the repressed desires that lie therein. Employing an essaystic form and dialectical montage, Tafakory explores how the ban on cinematic representation of intimacy between men and women was sidestepped by filmmakers. More than archival indexing of suppressed desire, these works embody their unseen, muted narrator within the viewer, intensifying our intellectual and emotional identification.

She Stuttered curates earlier works that venture out into Iran’s public sphere, juxtaposing documentary and archive footage with filmed performance. It is in these works that subversion and resistance takes an explicit, decisive position, as the visible ‘performance’ of femininity (written, whispered, acted) is intercut in opposition to the cultural-dominant masculinity. 

It is rare for daring radicality and incisive critique to be complemented by such poetic means of expression. Individually, Tafakory’s films are powerful documents of resistance; experienced collectively under these two programs and in the presence of the artist herself (along with “site-specific” performances) they are a privileged highlight of One World Romania 17.

(Andrei Tănăsescu)